Mad Catz M.O.U.S.9 Gaming Mouse Review

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Closer Look: M.O.U.S.9

Mad Catz is retiring its “Cyborg” brand, so the new M.O.U.S.9 is simply a Mad Catz product. You can get the mouse in any of four finishes: glossy black, glossy white, glossy red, or flat black. My review sample was glossy black.

The M.O.U.S.9 is very visually similar to the R.A.T. series mice, as this comparison photo shows. Personally I find this shape very comfortable (especially the R.A.T. mouse, with its adjustable thumb support), but if your preferred mouse grip is “claw” rather than “palm”, you might not.

The large round button on the left side of the mouse defaults to “Precision Aim”, a feature which drops the effective mouse resolution, slowing the mouse cursor while the button is held down. On a gaming mouse, you’d use this to get that difficult head shot. For this mouse, Mad Catz helpfully notes that it would be useful tweaking selections in Photoshop (and it is). Above that are two slender silver buttons that default to “Forward” and “Backward” in your browser, and above them is a handy cylindrical thumb wheel. Each direction of spin for the thumb wheel is separately programmable. A blue LED indicator on the left edge of the mouse, on the “wing” portion by the left mouse click button, indicates Bluetooth connection status and will blink at two second intervals when the battery is low.

From the top we can see the standard left click and right click buttons (whose functions are not programmable; but don’t worry: there are 10 other buttons you can program), as well as a scroll wheel. Unlike the fixed scroll wheel of the R.A.T. series, the M.O.U.S.9 scroll wheel can be tilted side to side. The default assignment for this feature is horizontal scrolling. Below the scroll wheel is a small silver button, and there’s another silver button (the “wing” button) to its left. Both of these are programmable as well.

The only control on the right side of the mouse is the release switch for the adjustable palm rest at the rear of the mouse.

In the picture above, the palm rest is adjusted all the way in, but pressing the silver release switch lets you slide it out up to 20mm: